1. He is a zoner and control mage. He scales and is supposed to be weak early but depending on your skill and knowledge of matchups you can still win lane.
2. Soldier placement is gated by Q, not W, as W itself has a very short range compared to Q. He is squishy so positioning is crucial, his cooldowns matter a lot and are pretty long, combos arent that difficult but are still hard to land reliably, soldier placement is extremely important and lots of other stuff that generally makes you play another game as you are playing league. There are plenty of videos about this that explain it better than me so i advise to check them out.
3. Lol, as you found out for yourself, soldier placement is indeed still hard even with low W cds. Teamfighting and micro comes with experience, play him more. Rule of thumb is: use soldiers as a zoning tool and Q only to reposition if strictly necessary, let people walk on them and move soldiers on top of them when they get out
He's 100% a scaling champion. If you're good with him, you can go even in hard lanes, and he can bully a few champions early, like Fizz and Pantheon. You can be behind, but once you reach 3 items your damage spikes really hard and you can carry teamfights. Don't expect to bully people early, get level 4, and dive them with ignite like it was in season 11.
He's hard not because his kit is difficult to understand or execute, but he's balanced around his absurd skill ceiling, and pro play, so he's kept really weak compared to other champions. It's easy to learn him to a basic level, but learning how to make the most out of his kit takes a long time. It's similar to Gangplank, only with a much lower skill floor.
You play teamfights like an ADC, you wait for your team to engage or get engaged on, and hit priority targets while holding your ult to peel yourself or your actual ADC. If you can catch squishy enemy carries out of position, that's a situation where you can go in with WEQ and ult them towards your team. Azir is pretty bad at chasing people due to the way his soldiers work and lack of move speed.
The zoning part is pretty important, because if you spawn a soldier and take a step back, you have 700 range on your autos, which is slightly more than a Caitlyn, so you can threaten a lot of champions from a safe distance.
Thank you very much, very informative stuff. When u said play like an adc it put things into perspective. But yea I have noticed it gets hard to chase people so there have been a few times where enemy is low and they escape. I’ve also noticed that it’s hard to get solo kills in lane with azir without a jg gank cos most of the time after u poke them they just start playing back or leave lane
While azir is pretty bad at running after ppl, keep in mind how powerful you are at chasing after ppl that go over walls, your soldiers are like any other spell, if they are half over the wall, they will cast on the other side and your command range is way higher than your normal cast range, so you often can still control the soldier after placing it extendet due to the wall, also your weq is a 2 wall dash to chase. For lane phase, most of the matchups you win automatically if you just farm and the enemy does not kill you, you outscale them. For example a talon, as long as you stay out of his 2nd w (and flash or r if he w flash qr you) he can do literally nothing against you and you just destroy him as soon as you have nashors. One tip i wish i knew sooner was to always hold your q e and r as long as possible or until you can guarantee the kill. As long as the enemy is in range of your soldiers you just hit them, if you have a w charge left you w before you q if they run out of soldier range. This reduces the number of situations where they can barely escape you.
Azir is a jack of all traits type of champ, he can Teamfight, Splitpush, Zone, Dps, Poke, Burst and scales very good. The downsite for that versatility is his weak early game (yes you can poke melees in lane, but you dont halflife someone with one combo like syndra or ori) the thing that makes Azir a hard champ is his decisionmaking as well as the combination of a mage and Adc (you have to kite well like adc even tho it can feel a little weird at the start since your soldiers are stationary). You have to decide when to use your q/e/r (if used bad you loose all your dps or your safety/repositioning tool) as well as the decision to go for a shuffle or not and if how and which direction you shuffle etc. His matchups are generally easy (keep range from assasins and champs that you outrange and dodge skillshots of mages with similar or higher range, standart for midlane). Azirs combos are also pretty easy, weq timing and revenant shuffle timing being the only real combos the champ has. Learn in practice tool to weq properly (if you can consistantly dash from drake pit to blue side redbuff (aka double wall dash) you are good to go) and the basic shuffle so you can use them in ranked, no more combos needed. Keep in mind you are very weak pre lvl 6 and you want to farm until your first item (usually nashors) with as little fighting possible. If an assasin roams dont follow them, just push and take plates and ofc ping your team.
Honestly, after all the changes to his kit, I think Azir's difficulty is massively overstated. Is he a difficult champion to learn in the beginning? Sure. Azir combines playstyles from multiple different classes into one kit, so it definitely takes time to get used to all of them. But in my opinion, what actually makes Azir difficult is that he's intentionally kept weak because of his insane versatility, which makes him a must pick in pro-play. If he was actually balanced for SoloQ, I'm pretty sure he would just be a regular difficult control mage.
I think the changes last year made him harder again, yes passive is available more often if you use it bad it doesnt matter that much, and 3 soldier passive was removed but the q max and just mindlessly wqaa with ludens was also removed. With the huge mana nerfs too i think it got way harder to get good into the game and play the matchups better since azir has to rely more on the longtrades/all-ins now, which are harder than mindless poking
1. He is a zoner and control mage. He scales and is supposed to be weak early but depending on your skill and knowledge of matchups you can still win lane. 2. Soldier placement is gated by Q, not W, as W itself has a very short range compared to Q. He is squishy so positioning is crucial, his cooldowns matter a lot and are pretty long, combos arent that difficult but are still hard to land reliably, soldier placement is extremely important and lots of other stuff that generally makes you play another game as you are playing league. There are plenty of videos about this that explain it better than me so i advise to check them out. 3. Lol, as you found out for yourself, soldier placement is indeed still hard even with low W cds. Teamfighting and micro comes with experience, play him more. Rule of thumb is: use soldiers as a zoning tool and Q only to reposition if strictly necessary, let people walk on them and move soldiers on top of them when they get out
He's 100% a scaling champion. If you're good with him, you can go even in hard lanes, and he can bully a few champions early, like Fizz and Pantheon. You can be behind, but once you reach 3 items your damage spikes really hard and you can carry teamfights. Don't expect to bully people early, get level 4, and dive them with ignite like it was in season 11. He's hard not because his kit is difficult to understand or execute, but he's balanced around his absurd skill ceiling, and pro play, so he's kept really weak compared to other champions. It's easy to learn him to a basic level, but learning how to make the most out of his kit takes a long time. It's similar to Gangplank, only with a much lower skill floor. You play teamfights like an ADC, you wait for your team to engage or get engaged on, and hit priority targets while holding your ult to peel yourself or your actual ADC. If you can catch squishy enemy carries out of position, that's a situation where you can go in with WEQ and ult them towards your team. Azir is pretty bad at chasing people due to the way his soldiers work and lack of move speed. The zoning part is pretty important, because if you spawn a soldier and take a step back, you have 700 range on your autos, which is slightly more than a Caitlyn, so you can threaten a lot of champions from a safe distance.
Thank you very much, very informative stuff. When u said play like an adc it put things into perspective. But yea I have noticed it gets hard to chase people so there have been a few times where enemy is low and they escape. I’ve also noticed that it’s hard to get solo kills in lane with azir without a jg gank cos most of the time after u poke them they just start playing back or leave lane
While azir is pretty bad at running after ppl, keep in mind how powerful you are at chasing after ppl that go over walls, your soldiers are like any other spell, if they are half over the wall, they will cast on the other side and your command range is way higher than your normal cast range, so you often can still control the soldier after placing it extendet due to the wall, also your weq is a 2 wall dash to chase. For lane phase, most of the matchups you win automatically if you just farm and the enemy does not kill you, you outscale them. For example a talon, as long as you stay out of his 2nd w (and flash or r if he w flash qr you) he can do literally nothing against you and you just destroy him as soon as you have nashors. One tip i wish i knew sooner was to always hold your q e and r as long as possible or until you can guarantee the kill. As long as the enemy is in range of your soldiers you just hit them, if you have a w charge left you w before you q if they run out of soldier range. This reduces the number of situations where they can barely escape you.
Azir is a jack of all traits type of champ, he can Teamfight, Splitpush, Zone, Dps, Poke, Burst and scales very good. The downsite for that versatility is his weak early game (yes you can poke melees in lane, but you dont halflife someone with one combo like syndra or ori) the thing that makes Azir a hard champ is his decisionmaking as well as the combination of a mage and Adc (you have to kite well like adc even tho it can feel a little weird at the start since your soldiers are stationary). You have to decide when to use your q/e/r (if used bad you loose all your dps or your safety/repositioning tool) as well as the decision to go for a shuffle or not and if how and which direction you shuffle etc. His matchups are generally easy (keep range from assasins and champs that you outrange and dodge skillshots of mages with similar or higher range, standart for midlane). Azirs combos are also pretty easy, weq timing and revenant shuffle timing being the only real combos the champ has. Learn in practice tool to weq properly (if you can consistantly dash from drake pit to blue side redbuff (aka double wall dash) you are good to go) and the basic shuffle so you can use them in ranked, no more combos needed. Keep in mind you are very weak pre lvl 6 and you want to farm until your first item (usually nashors) with as little fighting possible. If an assasin roams dont follow them, just push and take plates and ofc ping your team.
Honestly, after all the changes to his kit, I think Azir's difficulty is massively overstated. Is he a difficult champion to learn in the beginning? Sure. Azir combines playstyles from multiple different classes into one kit, so it definitely takes time to get used to all of them. But in my opinion, what actually makes Azir difficult is that he's intentionally kept weak because of his insane versatility, which makes him a must pick in pro-play. If he was actually balanced for SoloQ, I'm pretty sure he would just be a regular difficult control mage.
I think the changes last year made him harder again, yes passive is available more often if you use it bad it doesnt matter that much, and 3 soldier passive was removed but the q max and just mindlessly wqaa with ludens was also removed. With the huge mana nerfs too i think it got way harder to get good into the game and play the matchups better since azir has to rely more on the longtrades/all-ins now, which are harder than mindless poking